Saturday, July 1, 2017

BLACKMAIL: Trump Tried To Extort Scarborough and Brzezinski With Salacious Tabloid Story Threat

Yesterday Donald Trump spent his morning disparaging MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough by sending out a repulsive pair of tweets in which he belittled both of them and singled out Brzezinski, a woman, by disparaging her looks.

In the tweet Trump referred to Scarborough as a "psyco" and called Brzezinski "crazy", "low IQ" and claimed she was "bleeding badly from a face-lift."

Today Scarborough and Brzezinski struck back at Trump revealing that the White House had threatened both of them by holding a salacious tabloid story over their heads as a way to extract an apology for their tough comments on Donald Trump.

In both an op-ed article in the Washington Post, and then in their live appearance on their morning show "Morning Joe," the couple said top White House officials warned them that the National Enquirer was planning an exposé about their relationship, and urged them to grovel for Trump's forgiveness for their unflattering coverage and beg him to get the paper to drop the story.

Scarborough said on "Morning Joe" that he got calls from "three people at the very top of the administration" pointing out that Trump was friends with "the guy that runs the National Enquirer." a reference to David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media, Inc. who owns the supermarket tabloid.

Scarborough continued...

"And they said, ‘If you call the president up, and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike this story.’ I had, I will just say, three people at the very top of the administration calling me, and the response was like, are you kidding me? I don’t know what they have, run a story."

FACT CHECK:New York magazine published a story on Friday afternoon supporting the MSNBC hosts’ account and adding that one of the aides in question was Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

After Scarborough said his piece Brzezinski went on to say of Trump...

"Let me explain what they were threatening. They were calling my children. They were calling close friends."She said "these calls persisted for quite some time, and then Joe had the conversations that he had with the White House where they said 'Oh, this could go away.'"

Within minutes of the show's ending Trump again attacked the two on Twitter...

Once again Trump's twitter habit of posting without thinking has landed him between a rock and a hard place as the tweet he sent is essentially a tacit admission of control over the Enquirer's coverage.

Then just to make things interesting, and to make Trump sweat a little, Scarborough responded to Trump's taunt with a tweet of his own...

Critics suggested that if Scarborough and Brzezinski's version of events is accurate it should be investigated as an abuse of power.